Tech 4 School LibrariansBooks and Bytes2017-04-28T03:54:09Zhttp://www.tech4schoollibrarians.com/feed/atom/WordPresshaturnerhttp://www.tech4schoollibrarians.com/?p=1032017-04-28T03:54:09Z2017-04-28T03:54:09ZPresenting at YSS tomorrow on the innovation of Making. I have been inspired by the likes of Diana Rendina and Laura Flemming who have given the library world fantastic resources on how to start a makerspace. My main challenge with makerspaces is that I see them becoming a glorified arts and crafts experience. There is nothing wrong with this but in the age of intense accountability it is imperative that we create experiences that engage deeper thinking. Creation and innovation along with creativity and authentic experiences are paramount if we are going to gain a foothold in the educational realm.

Librarians are at a crossroads as to what they need to do to remain relevant in a world of eBooks, renting textbooks, 1:1 chromebooks, etc. I think makerspaces could be a part of the solution. We are really good at getting students to think deeper into inquiry and we need to market and develop those tools that are unique to librarianship.

]]>0haturnerhttp://www.tech4schoollibrarians.com/?p=972016-10-07T15:37:17Z2016-10-07T15:37:17ZIf you are like me you are constantly using the search function in Google Drive. You are also a person that uses Google Chrome’s omnibar for everything. Did you know you can type in youtube.com and press tab and it creates a search of youtube for you? Type away your search.

Now there are a lot of search engines listed in Chrome but you can create your own! Thank you so much ShakeUpLearning for cluing me in.

How to Edit Your Chrome Search Engines:

Right-click on the Omnibox, and select, “Edit Search Engines.” This will open your search engine settings in Google Chrome.

From here, scroll down to the very bottom to add a new search engine.

Name your search engine.

Then choose the keyword you want to use. I use the letter “d.” It doesn’t even have to be a full word.

Then just copy and paste this search URL: https://drive.google.com/#search?q=%s

Searching Tips & Tricks:

When searching if you type in the following items you will get better results. One of my favorites is Filetype: because when searching for images I usually need a transparent background. This occurs with PNG images therefore I will search Filetype:PNG to get images that have a transparent background. Also remember to search only Open Source images that can be modified when doing this though.

Filetype:

Add the type of file you are searching for such as PDF, DOC, PPT, PNG, etc.

Time

Weather

Define:

This will define any word within the Google Search

Translate

Translate any word

allintext:

Must have your search term in the website

allintitle:

Must have your search term in the title of the website

~

Use the symbol to look for your search term and others that are related

ebook:

search for only ebooks

inurl:

Search term must be in the URL/Web Address

daterange:

Search for a certain time period

movie:

Search for movies

cache:website address

Search for the cached version of a website (cached=stored version)

site:

Search within a single site. Put the site in and then your search terms

]]>0haturnerhttp://www.tech4schoollibrarians.com/?p=922016-06-03T02:20:59Z2016-06-02T14:44:04ZThere are so many options for helping students review content for finals but which ones are the best? I have used several and below are some of my favorites.

Flippity – create your own automatically score tallied Jeopardy Game. Forever when setting up a Jeopardy game the students will bicker back and forth about the score. Take the frustration out by using Flippity which actually uses a Google Spreadsheet that is published. The creators of the Jeopardy Game aka Quiz Show also have flashcards which are great for review. Check them out you will not be disappointed.

Socrative & Kahoot! – Competition is helpful when trying to review with students and both of these sites help you easily great games to help review. You can use any internet ready device to use both programs and students do not have to create an account to use them.

ClassTools.net – ClassTools.net offers a free service teachers can use to create their own educational games. You can get rid of the ads for a fee but they are not extremely distracting. You can find a variety of tools on this site from fake facebook templates to arcade review games. They are easy to setup and embed in your own site.

Purpose Games – is a free service that allows users to create custom games, share games, and play games. You can create multiple choice games or go deeper and create interactive images and maps that have the user name the correct places or names of images.

Triventy – Very similar to Kahoot! You can write your own questions or edit existing quiz. All quizzes are presented on a large screen – just like you would run a presentation. Your students will use a short link (triv.in) to join the quiz from their laptops, tablets or smartphones – no need to install any App! Students can login with Google which makes that process very easy.

These are some of my favorite review sites. Do you have any you enjoy? Share them in the comments.

]]>0haturnerhttp://www.tech4schoollibrarians.com/?p=862016-05-22T00:44:13Z2016-05-22T00:37:33ZProject Inspiration: Students are fascinated with Ancient Greece and I thought it would be interesting for students to take their inquiry questions and interest video-making and combine it into a collaborative project. This project could be for grades 6 and up depending on the curriculum.

Essential Question: What if we lived in Ancient Greece? What is the importance of Ancient Greece to us today? What can we learn about ourselves from the Ancient Greeks?

The Situation: A film crew has been transported back in time to report on Ancient Greece. It is your job to do research on an aspect of Ancient Greek life for the film crew. You are also charged with creating the scripts the film crew will follow when they go live with a new program called: Live From Ancient Olympia.

Note: Prior to beginning the actual project students read some ebooks (Rosen Publishings Interactive eBooks on Ancient Greece) on Ancient Greece to get perspective and background information. These are fantastic ebooks that are simotaneous use with are my favorite! Timelines and keywords defined. There are so many resources. Full Disclosure: I am good friends with one of the reps. But it is still an awesome resource and there are no other eBooks out there like it. The key to the success of the project is organization and the use of jobs in each group. The project began with the Marshmellow Challenge to get students to begin to work together and think about each person’s strengths.

Each group includes:

Manager—keeps group members on task; communicates with teacher; provides leadership

Techie—manages the group’s technology needs; knows how to use the technology or is willing and able to learn new technology as needed for this project.

Archivist—organizes found stories, photos, and artifacts

Each class (of 4-5 groups) work on one news broadcast. Therefore, in each class there was one video editor, one camera person, and two anchors. This worked extremely well for creating the video. Not all students are interested in video editing and it can be time-consuming so those students interested in the process can be involved. The feedback from the students was overwhelmingly positive. They enjoyed the process and learned a lot.

]]>0haturnerhttp://www.tech4schoollibrarians.com/?p=822016-03-03T02:38:18Z2016-03-03T02:38:18ZWith the shutting down of Jaycut quite a few years ago I was crestfallen to be able to edit videos with greenscreen (chromakey) online. On the chromebooks this is challenging. I did bite the bullet and purchase a pro-account because chromakey was extremely important to me. However, if it is not the free version really works really well.

If you are a fan of Animoto it is a more robust version. Students would sometimes get frustrated by the limits of Animoto but were not yet ready for a full-fledged video editor so there are two different modes – timeline and storyboard (easier). You can easily toggle between both of them.

I have found this to be a superior product when trying to do Book Trailers with students. The free version allows downloading of 5 minutes a month. Book Trailers should be around 60 seconds so this works perfectly for me. I do not have such restrictions with the paid account.

The Chromakey (green screen) is pretty good. It is not Photoshop or Camtasia but it really does the job pretty well. For student’s beginning experience with chromakey it works very well.

]]>0haturnerhttp://www.tech4schoollibrarians.com/?p=772015-09-25T01:34:42Z2015-09-25T01:34:42ZI was very excited about Google Classroom when it first came out and was one of the few that got access pretty early on. My Tech coordinator was intrigued as was I. I started to play with it and found I could not do everything I wanted to do:

More than One Teacher

Online Rubrics (Goobric)

Comment on Documents when first created

Add students outside my domain

I am happy to say that these issues have been fixed. It is not the robust LMS of something like Schoology but it really gets the job done very relative ease. Co-teachers can now both be in the class (as educators/admins) within Google Classroom under About (button is Invite a Teacher on the left-hand side).

My biggest pet peeve was that you could not add students outside your domain. Our district when creating our GAFE accounts decided to put students and adults in two different domains. So we had to have two accounts if we wanted to use Google Classroom. Thank goodness they have fixed this by allowing GAFE admins to add other GAFE domains to a whitelist.

Goobric now works with Google Classroom so all the online rubrics you created with Docotopus will now work with Google Classroom Assignments! YES!! Video on how it works.

Documents. Comment access is available as soon as the student opens the document for the first time. This is ideal when helping students in real-time.

Lastly, they recently added something that just blew my mind. How many times have you had issues with students copying down URLs and messing it up? Even if you used bitly or tinyurl or QR codes? I have so many times I have lost count. Now you can have your GAFE admin add the Share to Classroom GoogleExtension (How to add it to your domain globally). Of course you can have your students do it individually as well. This extension changed my life. You can push out pages to your students! From Google, “The extension allows you to push webpages to your any of your Classroom classes, so they open instantly on your students’ computers. With this extension, you can get your students on the right page, quickly and reliably every time. You can also post announcements, create assignments, or save webpages to post to Classroom later.”

]]>0haturnerhttp://www.tech4schoollibrarians.com/?p=672015-03-15T19:15:52Z2015-03-15T19:15:32ZGoogle Slides is a wonderful tool to use with students for presentations. However the selection of created templates is rather limited. You can of course go to the plethora of templates @ Google Templates however they tend to be more of the same. Slides Carnival has created professional looking templates that are very easy to use. A few clicks are you are on your way to a professional looking presentation with all the unique slides many have expected from Microsoft Powerpoint. In all my research the presentations remain totally free.

]]>0haturnerhttp://www.tech4schoollibrarians.com/?p=602014-11-23T04:17:17Z2014-11-23T04:11:48ZGoogle Classroom has been written about quite a bit in the past few months but I have a take on it from a Librarian perspective. I really like the ease of the site and the integration with Google Drive. It is much easier for my staff to understand the functionality of things like Doctopus and gClassfolders if they do not have to use them. For the most part GC does everything they need it to do. I quite like the ease of adding items to GC. There are many options from a uploaded (from computer) to a youtube video and from your drive of course. GC also created a folder in your Google Drive so you can keep track of that information. It lacks many of the addon that Edmodo or Schoology, or Canvas, or Moodle and the list goes on.

As a librarian the items that frustrate me:

You cannot add a co-educator/administrator

This is especially challenging when the teachers sometimes want me to show them how to do it the first time (ie: I do it the first time)

You must be in the same domain as your students (this is not always the case in GAFE schools and having two accounts is not ideal for most teachers)

Putting resources in folders makes location of items easier for students

You cannot add outside your domain

Assignments do not show up in a student’s calendar

Gradebook is not robust to say the least

They have fixed:

Now you do not have to submit an attached item to complete an assignment

You can delete students comments (I can get rid of the Hi’s when they first begin)

Overall I do not GC but I think that we are at the beginning and it will get better with time. I think we are looking at a product that is entering a well matured field of lots of LMS. I would like to see innovation in the LMS and I look forward to see it.

Learning Management Systems are a big part of the Flipped Classroom movement. However, you do not have to use a flipped classroom to utilize these tools. Some are free and others are paid such as Blackboard. Meeting and interacting with students online is important. Facebook is bad word in education and therefore has not been utilized as a way to interact with students and teachers. I have tried many different ways to utilize interactive sites. Websites, Blackboard, Moodle, and the list goes on. Two of the most popular from my experience are Edmodo and Schoology. Both are great but it depends on what you will use them for. Therefore I thought I would do a little bit of a compare and contrast on their use for Libraries. Just because some of use do not have traditional classes does not mean that would could not use such a tool.

Edmodo– this is a website that uses a simplified version of Facebook. It can be used in the classroom to connect with students and even as a location for students to turn in work. There is a both a social aspect and assessment. Quizes, grades, and attendance can be completed using this site. It is completely free. The only cost would be if you chose to add apps to the website that have a cost. I used this site last year for all of my clubs and library assistants called iStaff. I found the students tended to forget to check outside of meetings. Though a couple of teachers have started to use it so I think its use will become habitual. If a student has a smartphone they can access the tool.

Pros:

Easy to use Facebook like functionality

Easy to give feedback to students

Creation of Polls to interact quickly with students

Very little introduction for students

Creation of small groups within a class

Ability to post information to the group

Ability to submit assignments

Attendance recording

Grading and Badges

iOS & Android Apps

Parent Access

Calendar

Image Source: SMS Edmodo Site

Cons:

iPad app is a little cumbersome. Uploading files is a fair amount of steps

Posts are only chronological so the board can get messy

Parents do not see the same things as students

Students can start to use the posts for social interaction (Hi messages then become cumbersome)

The site takes some of the functionality of blackboard and Edmodo. I think of it as the big brother of Edmodo. I think Edmodo is perfect for elementary and early middle school and then upper middle school and high school would graduate to Schoology. It is very similar to what students will use in College even if they do not take online classes.

Pros

Updates (Posts) and Discussion Boards

Discussion boards with nested discussion

Settings for Tests and Quizes (Time Limits & Retakes)

Groups and Apps

Ability to setup modules or lessons (with materials) within a class or group

Calendar syncs with Google Calendar

Dropbox like feature for assignments

Online Gradebook and Attendance

Ability to track students usage

Email and SMS text notifications to keep everyone up to date

Announcement: Brings the message to the top of the Updates list

Create Blogs within the product

Embedding Videos

Google Docs Synced

Cons

No small group creation options

Takes more time to learn and teach students

Long student access codes

No messaging between students (could be a pro as well)

It connects your class as a ‘course’ not a ‘class’. This makes it easier for high school teachers, but for my single class, students became confused as to where they needed to go for their assignments, discussion boards etc.

Image Source: My Schoology Group

In the end the LMS that you choose will depend entirely on what the students need. Schoology is my choice due to the functionality of the site. I can do so much more with the site and organizationally speaker it works for me. It makes sense to me. I really gave Edmodo a fair shot and used it the entire year but I found it to be a bit too social for my needs. I encourage collaboration and interaction of course. But in the end the purpose the LMS is clear – to convey information, interact with it, and further the knowledge journey.

I have had quite a few teachers collaborating with me this summer. It is the first time I have been 4 years in the same place and it is pretty exciting. I have a good idea of who I will be connecting with and what my year will look like. Of course the projects are always changing but I am feeling great.

Librarianship in schools and really anywhere is all about collaboration and innovation. If you are not changing you are sure to loose your position and (gasp) perhaps the library itself. We all have seen the results of libraries that have lost their librarians. It is true sadness. Project-Based Learning is a door into something oldish and new again. What is PBL but authentic inquiry-based experiences. We are experts in inquiry. In fact when I first started working on PBL I thought I was doing it wrong because it came so naturally to me. Of course there were a few new buzz words and techniques but overall it is a inquiry experience.

I decided to take the 4 day training in PBL at the end of May (very scary with so many projects going on) but I felt I needed to be a leader in the conversation. The only way I could do that was to have the information for my teachers who were going to be struggling as to what this “new” PBL learning meant. Luckily we have a very supportive BOCES (regional information center of sorts) who gave us an amazing amount of training and experience (@Pshaw63@joanne_keim@dpawlewicz). I walked out of that training ready to go with a project. In fact I put the project into practice in June. I know crazy crazy. But I really wanted to try it out.

Impressions: Students were extremely engaged. A big part of the process is voice and choice to make the experience authentic. Another thing I did was to make the groups myself. Students did work in groups of 2 but they did not choose the groups. This made a big difference. I tended to put students who were troublesome together and boy let me tell you they really did amazing things. They no longer could depend on the “good” student to do the work for them. Also by putting “good” students together I could focus my time on those students that needed aid and help.

Suggestion: Join the conversation. Do not be afraid to connect with your teachers outside the library. It is really about the students and I will do just about anything to help the students grow and innovate.